Tagg Romney: Mitt had "no desire to run" for president

I stumbled upon this article in the Boston Globe a couple days before Christmas but had too many holiday-related family obligations to really get into it until now. The point of the rather lengthy article is to go through the reasons Romney lost the election. Some of the reasons, of course, are familiar as we at C4P have been making the same points for the past four years: Romney is a liberal and can’t fluently espouse conservative ideas, he can’t use Obamacare to his advantage since he basically invented it, he can’t connect with ordinary people, he’s about as charismatic as a rusty lamp post, he’d be the perfect foil for Obama’s class warfare campaign, etc., etc., etc. In short, by nominating him, the GOP was committing political hara-kiri. Mr. L provides a great synopsis of the article below. But before I get to that, I want to highlight one nugget in the piece that caused me to laugh out loud:

More than being reticent, Romney was at first far from sold on a second presidential run. Haunted by his 2008 loss, he initially told his family he would not do it. While candidates often try to portray themselves as reluctant, Tagg insisted his father’s stance was genuine.

“He wanted to be president less than anyone I’ve met in my life. He had no desire to . . . run,” said Tagg, who worked with his mother, Ann, to persuade his father to seek the presidency. “If he could have found someone else to take his place . . . he would have been ecstatic to step aside. He is a very private person who loves his family deeply and wants to be with them, but he has deep faith in God and he loves his country, but he doesn’t love the attention.”

Yes, you read that correctly. According to his son, the same guy who’s been running for president since at least 2002 and who spent hundreds of millions of dollars over the past four years undermining and outright destroying any Republican who posed a threat to his nomination "had no desire to run" and "would have been ecstatic to step aside" for someone else.

Natch.

While you attempt to wrap your brain around that chestnut, enjoy Mr. L’s commentary on the above quoted article.